Second Childhood Read Free Page A

fully exposed
    with a skull like a bottle cap inside its thought.
    It was the arms of my heart.
    A heart is a mind that’s only trying
    to think without an unconscious.
    The tentacle is a brain too.
    And its adaptable jelly’s
    just as intelligent as human blood.
    Sometimes you look into a baby’s eyes.
    “Bless her,” you suggest to passersby
    yourself being old and unnecessary.
    But no one does.
    Please, you beg. The tears of an infant can be bottled and hidden
    for special occasions.
    One drop on your tongue and you won’t ask for more.
    You’ve thought this somewhere before.

Born Below
    Born below a second time.
    The shade of the first cast across and down.
    Never shakes it off.
    Her mouth.
    “Don’t smile. It’s ugly. You’ll get lines.”
    The shade symbolizes an object in front of the sun:
    a blotted person
    and subversion.
    Her hand over her eyes indicates she herself is blocking the light.
    Never the best.
    The best has good taste and self-preservation, pride in property.
    What will we do with the others?

    She grows very little without light but stays weak
    (and hangs at the apartment window
    lacking attention doesn’t adapt).
    She’s a midget in a mighty nation.
    An eclipse of the face.
    What could be the value of being shaded
    in broad daylight.
    Of being aged in the night.
    Of learning the secular rule of life.

The Coldest Mother
    I can only follow one stone through
    to its interior: and I do.
    An amethyst from Achill.
    The stone is transparent violet.
    Firelight plays with its color the way eyes play with tears.
    It’s cold where east is north and the earth is flat
    and a person grows old.
    Equivalence—no matter at what distance.
    The fluttering snow is at the mercy of
    ever-increasing crescents crossing circles
    measured by squares, dashes,
    fish bladder, almond patterns, placenta.
    The folks up higher know everything of illness.
    I saw a child rolled in a cloak of snow
    to kill his fever.
    Irregular heart, aortic stenosis,
    rheumatism, atrial fibrillation, vertigo, blood clots,
    deafness, colitis and poor eyesight.
    Scars on a wrist and internal stitches,
    headaches, PTSD from winter accidents,
    childbirth. Sorry, this is ordinary
    stuff for a cold mother. At the end
    she wants to live in comfort like a pearl in an oyster.
    She can chill here in peace and suck on ice.
    The sun is warm, the northern lights are curtains
    blowing across the heavens to which I float.
    Every faraway ice floe leads to fairies.
    And every boat leads to material sciences.
    I know about both of them
    and I still believe they’re too much alike.
    White icebergs float or sink
    under the wings of Aer Lingus.
    Bling wobbles on a window:
    it’s the sun our beloved.
    See the monk on the Skellig squeeze and rub
    his frosty eyes
    when he spots twelve swans
    and a little girl
    on a purple amethyst in the ocean foam.

    An early scene
    innerly seen:
    random sprays
    of snow across Fresh Pond
    (far below freezing
    in Fahrenheit)
    could be a white man’s torso
    who escaped a hospital
    and shed his sheet and slid
    happily face down on a mud-streaked mass
    of ice. Could be cyclamen
    with its leaves like violets
    or refugee camps in Syria.
    I must not lose heart.
    It takes sixteen years for
    a soul to cross the silvery ice
    to the forbidden fields of grace
    never knowing if it’s fair
    to choose self-starvation over health care.
    I was such a cold mother a mineral was a flower.

Dear Hölderlin
    (for Maureen Owen)
    Years ago in a migration
    we each carried our own
    rug and pillow,
    telescope and strings.
    Our tent was portable and able
    to be dismantled.
    It could be rolled
    and stuffed very fast.
    Flowers and grass
    still grew freely and sea-lilac
    had already cracked
    the tarmac. So there was sustenance.
    At the estuary nearby
    two continents had split apart
    and a curlew
    flew alone and crying.
    Carefully a book
    would be buried
    with iodine and wine
    and food that doesn’t rot.
    The cross is a good marker
    for an avenue and